1.2.6-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.2.6 Jean Valjean Here is where I get annoyed that we find so much out about everybody in this book and yet we cannot find out what Jeanne’s last name is. We find out Valjean’s mother’s name. Chekhov’s Gun and whatnot but I really want to know what the sister’s name is! Basically I want to know everything ever about Valjean and what else is new? Jean Valjean is such a nicely-flowing name but it’s nto really Valjean’s name, is it? He is literally called the exact same thing as his father since his parents couldn’t be bothered to name him or his sister (I imagine that his sister named her children all those really weird names that got Napoleon to forbid really weird names as a reaction to that) and Valjean isn’t even a real last name but a ‘We’ve got to call that Jean pruner guy something so we know who we’re talking about.’ I wonder where Valjean was living after he became an adult and before his sister’s husband died. Was he still living with them? The books says that as long as she had a husband she fed and lodged her younger brother but it also said that he had just turned twenty-five when the husband died so he must have been working for nearly a decade at this point. How could they afford to do that? I know nothing about the husband but I somewhere along the way got it into my head that his name is Henri. He must have been very poor off as well if he’s going to marry someone as poor as Jeanne. What did he do for a living? He couldn’t have had any family if no one stepped up to help even babysit the kids so Jeanne could work sometimes. I think that in order for the little family to only start moving towards being wiped out after Henri’s death Valjean must have contributed his wages to them. They really couldn’t have ever REALLY been able to afford seven children, though, even if they were taking into account that some of them would not live to see adulthood (they all apparently survived as long as someone was earning money to feed them so I guess they were a healthy lot) so I don’t know why they went and had seven. They probably would have even had more if Henri had lived. I think three or four was probably the upper limit for affordability here. I don’t know how Valjean could have not had the time to fall in love since Hugo is a big fan of falling in love in an instant when you look at someone and I feel he probably had the time to look at people. I wonder if he was one of those eighteen-century outliers who believed in only having sex for love or if he just didn’t have the time (or money) to have sex with someone he didn’t love. I can’t believe that his sister took the best bits out of his bowl while he was eating. If she was going to do that, couldn’t she make it less obvious and obnoxious by doing it before he got home? And I understand her impulse to give the best to her children but it is a rather foolish impulse since all her children had to do was sit around not dying all day and Valjean needed the good parts to keep his strength up if he wanted to be able to work and make sure that they had any food at all. Jeanne may have taken him in after their parents died but she doesn’t really come off very well in this chapter. I’m getting the impression that she never showed any concern for her brother at all once her husband died and just kept demanding more and more from him for the children. And Valjean’s life was just so dreary that he refused to even pay attention to the world around him when he didn’t have to. I wonder if he ever worried about having to be a tree pruner since his father had been killed falling out of a tree once. I know that, even if it were a freak accident, I’d probably never be able to get near a tree if someone I knew had fallen out of one and died. He didn’t have a choice, though. I suppose I can’t really blame the children for constantly going to borrow milk when they were ‘habitually famished’ and the older one was eight when their father died so probably only ten when Vajlean was arrested but it’s just frustrating since if they had the money to pay for the milk they would have gotten milk in the first place and I feel like they would have known that but they kept doing it anyway. Probably because they never got in trouble and either the neighbor never collected on the debt or they knew Valjean always had the money for it. But I wonder why they just didn’t buy milk if they did have the money to pay for it. Not that I think milk is really going to help with hunger and they weren ever careful enough not to waste some of it (or at least the girls though at least one of the boys was younger than them). I appreciate Valjean not wanting to get the kids into trouble but if he had said something to them or the neighbor he could have stopped them always doing this. I bet Jeanne, not knowing what the money went towards, got mad at him for not bringing home his usual wage and probably thoughe he spent the money on himself and he just quietly accepted her anger to protect the children. Jeanne worked, too, but what could she do with seven small children? I’m curious as to what she did, exactly. Sewing? Washing? I wonder that she had to stay home and watch the kids all day. In a time where children younger than her older ones li ved on the street and managed not to starve, why did she have to watch them instead of leaving the older ones to watch the younger ones? Did she feel that the one-year-old was too young to be watched by the eight-year-old? So we learn that the baker was Maubert Isabeau but still don’t know the sister’s full name. That feels like rubbing it in. Then we get to the crime. First off, if you’re going to steal a loaf of bread why not steal more than one? I mean, really. Unless you think taking two or three will make it harder to escape there’s no reason not to go for broke here. And how did some random baker who would have been inside his shop manage to catch up with Valjean? Was he just really slow or something? And why did he break the glass with his fist and not a rock or something. I refuse to believe he couldn’t have found a rock. Maybe he still would have cut himself if the glass wasn’t completely cleared away but this is just terrible planning. Valjean has some forward-thinking problems. I think what probably happened was that he was just standing at the window staring at the bread and thinking about his starving nieces and nephews (and he and his sister wouldn’t have had any food and he was still trying to find work. I wonder how long they had gone without food and why he didn’t think to ask someone for help) and he acted before he realized what he was doing. Even if he had gotten away, flinging the loaves away meant the whole thing was completely pointless. And he just never saw his family again after he was arrested. I wonder what their last meeting was like and how his sister reacted to finding out that Valjean had been arrested and she was now all alone with the children. I feel like she probably blamed him and didn’t give a thought to how his situation was now worse than hers and the children’s could have ever been. I wonder, if everyone knew he was a poacher (why did that even come up at his trial if he wasn’t being charged with it? To show bad character? Trials just had no rules back then?) why he hadn’t been charged earlier. I kind of like the thought that he was just the best shooter ever though I wonder how people found that out in Toulon. Where did he get such mad aiming skills? It must have been self-taught. What is the legitimate prejudice against the poacher? It seems that only the people who owned the land he poached on should give a damn what he was up to. I suppose he couldn’t find any animals to kill that winter, either? So what happened to Valjean between his trial and being put on a chain gang? Did he just sit around in prison? Apparently despite how sluggish and insignificant Valjean appeared, he stood out from the other prisoners by being the most miserable or something if someone watching could remember him decades after the fact. And the section about him being put into the chain-gang…this is months after his crime and he’s still this upset and…I can’t even. Straight to the heart. I can’t believe that there wasn’t a closer prison (even a hard labor prison) that they really had to go from Paris twenty-seven days on a cart. It’s just so impractical. But I guess it doesn’t happen often and that’s why he was waiting around for so long before being put on a chain gang. Do they do this kind of thing twice a year or so? Hugo says he was probably ‘disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of everything, something excessive’ and it doesn’t seem that someone would have to be very intelligent or well-informed to rearlize that the situation they are in is completely disproportionate to the crime. I mean, again, we get to the point where the ignorance that Hugo says that poor uneducated peasants back then were capable of is far beyond what I can really accept people are capable of. I’m sure he was still called Valjean, if only by the other prisoners. I’m actually surprised that no one knew what happened to Valjean’s family. Maybe no one knew where they went afterwards but it seems like something that the neighbors would pay attention to out of morbid fascination and as something to gossip about, especially with the arrest. The thought that after a few years in the galleys, Valjean forgot the people he had been condemned to the galleys for might be the saddest thing about this whole chapter and not even just for the sake of his family. That they could take that from him…At least he was finally told that his sister and one of the children were okay and where to find them. I wonder what happened to the other children, though. Did they die? Did they run off and live like Gavroche? Did Jeanne abandon them? Did she leave them somewhere to work? How did that guy or apparently didn’t actually talk to her get the impression that she herself did not know where the other children were? As poor as she was, I’m sure she lived better in Paris than she did in Faverolles since she only had one child to worry about. And he even went to school so his life was improving. I wonder why he had to wait outside the school courthard for an hour instead of staying home and walking to school closer for the time to start. Since they said that the youngest child was seven and it was four years after Valjean was in prison that would have made him three when Valjean was arrested and so it was two years after Henri died that Valjean was arrested. ‘93, huh? Of course it was. Everything went to hell in ‘93. I do not believe it was a coincidence that Valjean had stayed put until around the time he heard word of his sister and then tried to escape. I wonder what it meant that his ‘turn’ arrived. It would have made more sense to try to escape earlier on in his term. Saying it was his turn sounds like people tried to escape all the time and in that case, with the three-five years tacked on, how did anyone ever get out of Toulon? Perhaps everyone else only tried to escape once. The issue of papers made trying to live as a fugitivie difficult but given what kind of papers they got when they got out I’m sure it wasn’t comparatively worse off. Valjean’s escape attempts keep getting less and less successful. Is it because he tries the same thing all the time? Is it because he actually thinks it might work the first time and doesn’t have much hope later? Is he more desperate to get out and that makes him less careful? Is it because they did not expect that he would try to escape before and now they know to watch him and so can catch him easier? The thought of him wandering around in a daze for two days, not having slept or eaten in 36-hours, is so heartbreaking. And him kneeling under the keel of a vessel for hours on end and being found there! That ‘freedom’ was probably more miserable than just staying in the galleys that day. And they don’t come right out and say that he received other punishments for the escape besides added time but I feel it is inevitable. I can’t believe he only resisted being taken back once and got two more years for it! By the fourth time the maritime tribunal was probably sick of seeing him. I feel that at this point (and most points) Valjean has Bossuet’s own luck.